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DOE Bioenergy Research Centers

What are the Centers?

To focus the most advanced biotechnology-based resources on the biological challenges of biofuel production, DOE established three Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs) in September 2007. Each center is pursuing the basic research underlying a range of high-risk, high-return biological solutions for bioenergy applications. Advances resulting from the BRCs will provide the knowledge needed to develop new biobased products, methods, and tools that the emerging biofuel industry can use.

The scientific rationale for these centers and for other fundamental genomic research critical to the biofuel industry was established at a DOE workshop involving members of the research community. The DOE BRCs have developed automated, high-throughput analysis pipelines that will accelerate scientific discovery for biology-based biofuel research.

The ultimate goal for the three DOE Bioenergy Research Centers is to better understand the biological mechanisms underlying biofuel production so that those mechanisms can be redesigned, improved, and used to develop novel, efficient bioenergy strategies that can be replicated on a mass scale. New strategies and findings emanating from the centers’ fundamental research ultimately will benefit all biological investigations and will create the knowledge underlying three grand challenges at the frontiers of biology:

  • Development of next-generation bioenergy crops
  • Discovery and design of enzymes and microbes with novel biomass-degrading capabilities
  • Development of transformational microbe-mediated strategies for biofuel production

The three centers are

The Centers are supported by multidisciplinary teams of top scientists from the nation’s leading universities, DOE national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and a range of private companies. The three Centers are located in geographically distinct areas and use different plants both for laboratory research and for improving feedstock crops.

The complexity of the three biological grand challenges that must be overcome to achieve industrial-scale bioenergy production requires the coordinated pursuit of numerous research approaches to ensure timely success. Collectively, the DOE Bioenergy Research Centers provide a portfolio of diverse and complementary scientific strategies that address these challenges on a scale far greater than any effort to date. See the BRC Research Strategies page for more information.

Now Featuring

Switchgrass Research Group: Progress Report [1/12]


BRC cover

Bioenergy Research Centers Report [07/10]


Biomass to Biofuels Report [07/06]


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Genomic Science-Related BER Research Highlights

  • Protein Complex Within Plant Cell Wall Associated with Secondary Cell-Wall Synthesis [Nov 30, 2011]
    The plant cell wall polysaccharide pectin is often associated with the tissue softening that occu [more...]
  • Designing Low Lignin, High Biomass Yielding Plants [Nov 28, 2011]
    The major barrier to the efficient conversion of biomass from plant feedstocks to biofuels is bre [more...]
  • Microbial Conversion of Switchgrass to Multiple Drop-In Biofuels [Nov 28, 2011]
    The low efficiency and high cost of enzymes used to break down plant material into sugars remains [more...]
  • How do Microbes Adapt to Diverse Environments? [Nov 22, 2011]
    Earth's microbes live in staggeringly diverse environments, colonizing habitats with extremes of [more...]
  • Permafrost Microbes Could Make Impacts of Arctic Warming Worse [Nov 06, 2011]
    In Earth’s Arctic regions, frozen soils (permafrost) sequester an estimated 1.6 trillion metric t [more...]
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